2/17/2023
Hi everyone, I hope you are well! I studied abroad last semester in Paris, and am so happy to be back at Amherst this spring. I thought for this week’s blog I would talk about my experience reintegrating at Amherst, and my first couple weeks of classes. Please email me at sgoldsmith24@amherst.edu if you have any questions!
Reintegration
A worry of mine when coming back to campus after a semester abroad was reintegrating to the Amherst community. I think I was nervous about participating in clubs that I had missed for a semester, and being with friends who I hadn’t spoken to or spent time with for a while. Another challenging aspect of returning from studying abroad is that several of my friends who didn’t study abroad last semester ARE abroad this spring, meaning we are away from each other for a year. This is the nature of being a junior in college: half the time, a large part of your cohort is away from campus. It is a little jarring to look around the dining hall and not recognize anyone, but in meeting new people in classes, and spending time with my friends who are still on campus, I’m able to feel surrounded by familiarity and part of a community.
In my free time, I’ve been going to hockey games, attending events with Hillel, going to office hours with friends, and sitting and reading in the library in the town of Amherst. I also try to spend time outside – it has been very warm this winter, and the bike trail is unseasonably not-iced-over. I enjoy going on runs there and soaking up any sun that I can.
My classes
As a biology and French double major, I must juggle catching up with my major requirements and fulfilling pre-med requirements after studying abroad. My French class this semester is called Women of Ill Repute, and discusses prostitution in 19th-century French literature. The class is incredible, and I’m glad I have the opportunity to take it. I’m also taking intro physics and intro statistics, both of which are to fulfill pre-med requirements. I am REALLY enjoying the statistics class – the professor is absolutely wonderful, and I feel very safe and welcome in the class. All my classes in the math department at Amherst have been nothing short of incredible, and I highly recommend taking at least one math or statistics class when you get to Amherst to see how much you can enjoy math when the person teaching it is great at their job.
For my biology major, I am taking an ecology class and an evolution ecology lab. The ecology class is interesting; it is composed of only lectures and tests, with no discussion sections, problem sets, or any sort of homework. There isn’t even an official textbook – the professor had a textbook deal and wrote his own textbook, before backing out of the deal. The book was never published, but at each class he gives us printouts from his “textbook” of the content we are learning that day, and says that all we need to be successful on the tests is the information in his handouts. The class is structured differently than every other class I’ve taken at Amherst, so it will be a bit of a challenge to do well on exams, but I enjoy the content. He is very funny, and the lectures are entertaining.
Thank you for reading! If you have any questions, please email me at sgoldsmith24@amherst.edu. I’d love to talk.